You are reading the website of the 2015 edition of the competition, which ended on Wednesday 13th May at 11:59 pm. We are planning to run a new edition next year, to start in January 2016. The website for that new edition appears in December here. If you would like to receive a reminder around that time by email please look here. For any particular enquiries you can contact us on cryptography_competition@manchester.ac.uk.

Chapter 3 of the Tale of the Carbon Conundrum.

The following day Ellie was inconsolable. "I just can't
believe that Barquith is gone," she said, staring at her uneaten
lunch. "And I'm sure I saw a gun up in the
gallery. Somebody was about to shoot Lord Porterfield, but
Barquith saved him!" She sobbed quietly to herself as Mike looked on
awkwardly, choking back his own tears.

"Barquith left us a coded message, so he must have been expecting
trouble," said Mike. "We've got two mysteries to solve: who shot
Barquith, and who stole the quantum computer?"

Ellie looked up. "The police searched everybody as they left. It
said on the news that they searched the whole building and found
nothing. And they've no idea how the computer was taken from the
locked room!" she said.

"They didn't find a gun either... I wonder if they're hidden in the
same place?" mused Mike.

The silence was broken as the bell rang. "Come along you two", said a
passing teacher. "Clear that food away: it's ICT next."

The lesson was all about binary numbers. The teacher explained how
different number bases work: how we use base 10 because we have 10
fingers, but the ancient Mayans used base 20, and computers use base
2, or binary.

"We already know about binary!" a familiar voice piped out from the
back of the room. "Instead of hundreds, tens, and units, with digits
0 to 9, you have fours, twos, and units, with digits 0 and 1", chimed
in a second voice.

"Darcie, Donna: stop showing off", said the teacher. "You're right
though, in base 10 you count 0, 1, 2, 3 and so on up to 9, then 10,
11, 12, then all the way up to 97, 98, 99, 100. In binary you count
0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, and so on. For example, 1101
in binary means 1 eight, 1 four, 0 twos and 1 unit, so that's
8+4+1=13 in base 10. Now, can you tell me how many binary digits, or
bits, I would need to represent all the letters of the alphabet?"

The lesson drew to a close but the class were enjoying themselves so
much that they hardly heard the bell ring. As they picked up their
bags, Ellie heard a familiar voice behind her. "We knew all of that
already!" said Darcie. "We're far smarter than you!" said Donna, as
the twins left the classroom.

"Let's see if there have been any developments about what happened
yesterday," said Ellie, as she turned on her tablet. She and Mike
scrolled through the news stories. "What's that!" said Mike, as one
item caught his eye. He read out the headline: "`Lord Porterfield
talks about his narrow escape'."

"`Today, Lord Porterfield released a statement paying tribute to the
man who died saving his life and called for those responsible to be
brought to justice'", said Ellie, reading out the summary. "I think we
owe it to Barquith to hear what Lord Porterfield has to say." She
clicked on the video.

If this video does not play, then click here to stream from the University of Manchester video repository.

Your task:

Above is the video of Lord Porterfield reading out his statement, but it contains a hidden message. Your task is to decode Lord Porterfield's statement. Once you have done that, submit your answer to the question below.